Hall of Fame Henry

Lorne Rubenstein

Lorne Rubenstein

If you are looking for some delightful and insightful golf reading during this week of the Presidents Cup, allow me to submit the work of Henry Longhurst. I make this suggestion not only because it is timely, Longhurst having been posthumously inducted on Tuesday into the World Golf Hall of Fame in the Lifetime Achievement category, but also because, well, even a little Longhurst goes a long way.

That said, I recommend a lengthy dose of Longhurst. He wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Times in London, never missing a day during 22 years in that post. (He wrote for the Times for 40 years in all). He was also the broadcaster “Up the Tower,” as Longhurst wrote of his years informing us of the play on the par-3 16th hole at the Masters from his perch behind the green. He knew the game — my, how he knew the game. He could play, and did, in the U.S. and French Amateurs.

Longhurst died in 1978, aged only 69, and anybody who read or heard him couldn’t forget him. I read his columns in the Sunday Times, and wherever I could find his writing. He also wrote for the British magazine Golf Illustrated. I was so pleased when I found a run of the magazine in a cabinet at the Royal Dornoch Golf Club during my first visit there 40 years ago this summer. I sat upstairs in the clubhouse overlooking the links while enjoying a pint or two, or, more likely a scotch, while reading Longhurst.

Perhaps I should have practised more and read less during that visit to Dornoch, which stretched from one day to 10 because I was so taken with the course, the club, and the town. Anyway, I continued to read Longhurst and got in at least one round a day and often two in the long light of a Scottish summer. Then there was more Longhurst as night swept over the links and the Dornoch Firth.

My reading Longhurst and playing Dornoch provided hours of pleasure, but, sad to say, my golf remained static. I left Dornoch to play the British Amateur — properly called the Amateur Championship — at Ganton Golf Club in Scarborough, England. I was 2-up with three holes to go in my opening match against Welsh International player Huw Evans. I lost the last three holes. So goes golf.

At least there was more Longhurst to console me and to bring me years of enjoyment. I remembered well the chapter in his autobiography My Life and Soft Times — please do read it, at the very least the chapters in which he focuses on his work as a “golfing scribe” and commentator, and, inevitably, his golfing ability.

Here is what he writes in the chapter Golf Gives Me Up:

“As my travels, writings and broadcasting increased, to say nothing of my age, my golf fell away and it became less and less fun to do progressively more badly something that one had once done reasonably well.”

It wasn’t long before Longhurst had enough with playing the game, perhaps more because he had become afflicted with the yips on the green than the inevitable deterioration of his swing that surely comes to all of us as we age.

He was frozen over a short putt, when, as he writes, “a small voice within me said, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ and I thought, ‘No, by God, I don’t.’ A great wave of relief came over me and on D-Day, 1968, I put the clubs up in the loft with the water tanks (on the property where he lived), closed the hatch, removed the steps and walked away. Nor have I for one second regretted it.”

Hmm.

Now to his writing for a moment. Longhurst writes that the best thing that happened to him was the shortage of paper during the years right after the Second World War. He had to learn to write, oh, 400 words rather than 1,200. He also read Winston Churchill’s writing, and learned from his economy of words. He cited, as one example, Churchill’s statement regarding the service of those in the British military: “Never in the whole field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few…”

I shouldn’t go on, given Longhurst’s view that the most effective writing is trenchant writing. But I must cite my first clear memory of Longhurst’s economy of words and what has been referred to as “brilliant flashes of silence.” It came at the 1962 Masters where Arnold Palmer was two shots behind Dow Finsterwald, who had finished, and also two back of Gary Player, with whom he was playing with Palmer. Palmer’s five-iron to the 16th finished some 45 feet from the hole, and just to the right and off the green.

Longhurst, up the tower, said, “He’ll do well to get down in two from there.”

Palmer chose a wedge and ran the ball along the green. Longhurst didn’t say a word. Why speak on the stroke? Here was a brilliant flash of silence. The ball rolled and rolled and fell in for a birdie.

“And there you have it,” Longhurst said. Palmer birdied the 17th hole and ended up in a playoff against Finsterwald and Player, which he won.

That was a long time ago and Longhurst has been gone for 29 years. Now, finally, he is in the World Golf Hall of Fame. I commend the short speech that fellow writer John Hopkins made at the induction in New York City, which 36 World Golf Hall of Fame members, including Marlene Streit, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, attended. Hopkins writes an always-enjoyable column for Global Golf Post, and he, as it happens, succeeded Longhurst as the golf columnist at the Sunday Times.

I wish he were still writing there, but we know what’s happened to golf writing. For now, let’s celebrate Henry Longhurst. Enjoy the Presidents Cup, which Jack Nicklaus said today could eventually surpass the Ryder Cup in popularity because of its global nature. But also take some time to enjoy Longhurst. I am confident you will relish his work.